book data
257 ratings,
4.00
average rating, 43 reviews
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published
June 28th 2005
(first published 2004)
by Penguin (Non-Classics)
binding
Paperback, 384 pages
isbn
0143035762
(isbn13: 9780143035763)
description
At long last, almost ten years since his previous book, Mark Helprin returns with The Pacific and Other Stories, a collection of sixteen stories that ...more
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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 347)
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avg 4.00
editions: all | this edition
editions: all | this edition
07/17/08
J
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Read in September, 2006
I had rather high hopes for this short story collection, The Pacific and Other Stories. Helprin’s manner is a kind of anachronistic old school seriousness leavened with mostly clean gags and jokes (though he’s not above profanity or vulgarity). Basically simple stories as simple morality tales, Good and Evil quite apparent and obvious. In this sense, Helprin, as a political conservative (he wrote speeches for the elder Bush), is also a cultural conservative of a certain decent kind.
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Read in July, 2006
First off: I hate politicizing literature. But sometimes it's inescapable.
It took me weeks to slog through this, and here's why: Helprin is so full of shit we'd mistake him for a latrine if he were painted white and dropped on a campground. Maybe I'm just falling into the same wrongheaded liberal trap that he accuses many of his reviewers of wallowing in, but this book feels--if not explicitly political--like an implicit piece of cultural commentary. It's a old-time conservative's w...more
It took me weeks to slog through this, and here's why: Helprin is so full of shit we'd mistake him for a latrine if he were painted white and dropped on a campground. Maybe I'm just falling into the same wrongheaded liberal trap that he accuses many of his reviewers of wallowing in, but this book feels--if not explicitly political--like an implicit piece of cultural commentary. It's a old-time conservative's w...more
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Read in March, 2009
[Abandoned as of 3/30/09:]
I've read six of the sixteen stories here, and can go no further: Good God, but the man overwrites. His work has always suffered from a sentimental, self-consciously "literary" quality—he does love to wax on about the light, and about notions of honor, and he never settles for ten words where two hundred might be shoe-horned into a story. And, aside from the first 200 or so pages of Winter's Tale, he's always proven to be pretty much witless (in ...more
I've read six of the sixteen stories here, and can go no further: Good God, but the man overwrites. His work has always suffered from a sentimental, self-consciously "literary" quality—he does love to wax on about the light, and about notions of honor, and he never settles for ten words where two hundred might be shoe-horned into a story. And, aside from the first 200 or so pages of Winter's Tale, he's always proven to be pretty much witless (in ...more
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recommends it for:
anyone who enjoys a GREAT set of short stories. This guy is the best.
I could never say enough about the quality of these short stories. Helprin is the very best at this genre and these are the single best collectin of short stories I have ever read. His depection in Monday is incredible and in each story he captures the essence of the human condition. He takes us to the emotional seat of each person in each story and it is an amazing depiction and presentation by a writer of how we live and of who we are. I'd have to say this is the single best work you can r...more
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Read in January, 2008
recommends it for:
Everyone
I haven't finished this collection yet, but it's been a real revelation for me. I had only read Helprin's longer work before (I thought was good, but not amazing), and his traditionalist style isn't really my cup of tea. But these short stories are on another level entirely - great, moving stuff. I appreciate anyone who can write moving pieces in short form without playing the normal games. And the lines in some of these - the description of the mother in "Last Tea with the Armorers" c...more
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Helprin, author of Ellis Island and A Winter's Tale, brings to this collection his usual deep look into life, love, and war in prose as "glassy and smooth as amber" (Los Angeles Times). Yet, written over two decades, these stories befuddled a few critics. Some praised Helprin's wise themes, character studies, dazzling prose, and detailed descriptions of how things, like baseball, work. Most agreed, however, that Helprin paints overly broad generalizations when it comes to people: honor
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Read in June, 2009
So far I've liked more than half the stories. Good, smooth writer.
Overall enjoyable. Helprin, author of Winter's Tale and other novels and collections, is a precise, gifted writer. I've not read his novels but I can sense the talent for longer works in this collection. He is clearly worldly wise, a warrior by training (Israeli military). As a proud jew, some of the stories contain jewish terms and references, which for me were the least interesting. My favorites of the 15 herein were...more
Overall enjoyable. Helprin, author of Winter's Tale and other novels and collections, is a precise, gifted writer. I've not read his novels but I can sense the talent for longer works in this collection. He is clearly worldly wise, a warrior by training (Israeli military). As a proud jew, some of the stories contain jewish terms and references, which for me were the least interesting. My favorites of the 15 herein were...more
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Read in December, 2007
I here make an admission about one of my limitations as a reader: I have never been able to fully appreciate the art of the short story. I tend to want the novel-length treatment for characters with whom I want to spend more time. I therefore took up this book with some trepidation, even though I had read and enjoyed other prose by Helprin.
My worries were groundless. The range of subject, time, and place was handled masterfully, and even though I like, as I said, to get to know chara...more
My worries were groundless. The range of subject, time, and place was handled masterfully, and even though I like, as I said, to get to know chara...more
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Read in July, 2009
This book took me a very long time to read, but it was worth it. I enjoyed every word and every story. I would recommend this book to anyone who appreciates writing in the old-fashioned sense: think Conrad, Crane, Hemingway, but with a bit more modern lyricism. I think the reader also has to appreciate nature writing. No one I have come across can portray water and light like Helprin can. And both men and women can appreciate his plots, which range from war stories to human interest stories.
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Read in July, 2007
Helprin's prose is clean and lucid, if occasionally too lavish for its ends, and I appreciate the dry, wry sense of humor in these stories. But all too often, the stories in The Pacific feel intellectually and even morally lazy. They are deliberately un-complex, presenting points without counterpoints.
In other words, many of these stories—"Monday" is a prime example—read simply as illustrations, examples-in-action, of Helprin's predetermined intellectual and moral stanc...more
In other words, many of these stories—"Monday" is a prime example—read simply as illustrations, examples-in-action, of Helprin's predetermined intellectual and moral stanc...more
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Read in June, 2007
Helprin writes beautifully, with well-crafted precision that is seamless in his conversational prose. He's one of those truly gifted authors that can say much more in what he chooses not to say. His narrative and dialogue are rich, full and spare all at once. He respects the power of his own writing and his readers and leaves unexpected emotions hanging tacitly in his text, in his comfortable and taut phrasing, in his readers' minds. He does this even as he crafts finely detailed scenes and can ...more
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Read in January, 2004
Helprin is one of my favorite authors. This is a collection of short stories and it is impossible to classify his writing. If you read these and want to try a full novel, pick up Winter's Tale, it contains utterly amazing prose. In The Pacific, start with "Monday' and the story of Fitch a contractor who lives in New York. You'll be hooked.
I read this when it was first published in 2004 and re-read several of the stories several times each year. I usually re-ready Winter's T...more
I read this when it was first published in 2004 and re-read several of the stories several times each year. I usually re-ready Winter's T...more
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Read in August, 2008
It took me a bit. Mark Helprin is a glorious wordsmith. A man who writes: "June was hot, perfect and strange. It started magnificently and was slowly transformed into the initial bakery days of summer, tolerable for their novelty, when the beaches are as hot and white as molten glass but the ocean is blue and numbingly cold." It still took me a bit. But oh--the filling inside the story sandwich is exceptional. If anything, you MUST read the story "Perfection." I don't watch b...more
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10/20/08
Hannah
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Read in October, 2008
Aargh, Helprin. I think his best medium is the epic novel (see Winter's Tale) rather than the short story. The story doesn't give him enough room to sprawl out and bring a thousand grand threads together in an enormous pattern - his stories read like set pieces, long descriptive passages clipped out of longer works, or predictable fables of sacrifice or love or patriotism. They're like antique theater sets - you can tell from the first where each of them is going, and then the rest is just wa...more
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Certainly my favorite of Helprin's short story collections. It's amazing that someone who writes such long novels is also a master of the short story.
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Read in May, 2009
There needs to be a category on GoodReads for "I started this book but never finished it." That is the category for this book.
Read in March, 2008
I really enjoyed a few of the stories in this book. "Jacob and the Telephone" was my favorite. However, a few of his stories are so bogged down with his inability to keep metaphors to a tasteful minimum. Metaphors serve a useful purpose, and I find some beautiful, but if you overdo it, it just gets silly and I felt like laughing half the time.
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